A Samurai Shodown exclusive deal for the PC was turned down by game director Nobuyuki Kuroki. An unnamed “PC download platform” wanted exclusive distribution rights for the game in return for the equivalent of “hundreds of thousands of copies,” but Mr. Kuroki firmly believed that this upcoming fighting game revival is going to have even more stellar performance than that.
A thread on ResetEra highlighted an article from Korean gaming website GameFocus. In this interview, they talk about Mr. Kuroki’s history with the fighting game genre, SNK, and the Samurai Shodown franchise in particular. Notably, there is also a mention of a Samurai Shodown exclusive distribution deal that was ultimately turned down.
Here is the relevant passage from the article, machine-translated into English:
Samurai Shodown wanted to sell his PC on a PC download sales platform on condition of a pre-order of hundreds of thousands of copies, but SNK Chief Commander declined Samurai [Shodown] as a title to be sold more than a million copies.
The “PC download platform” that was trying to make Samurai Shodown exclusive to their platform isn’t explicitly named. However, one can guess as to which platform was trying to secure such a deal. It isn’t explicitly named as such, but it’s reasonable to assume that the Epic Games Store was trying to get Samurai Shodown to be a PC exclusive on their platform. The store has been snapping up exclusive deals of games of all sizes in recent months and there aren’t really any other major players out there that are trying to secure exclusivity deals for their games.
We can’t say for certain who it was that was trying to make Samurai Shodown exclusive, but such a deal likely would have secured the developers a pretty payday. Since they’ve turned it down, it shows that they are supremely confident in the success of their title. Whether or not this was the right decision will only be revealed once the game has launched. Samurai Shodown will be released on June 25, 2019 — don’t forget that you can get the Season Pass for free if you buy it before June 30!
